“God bless you, Frédéric.”
“Father, mother, it is all right!” I announced, “and I have really finished this time!”
“Well, that is a good job!” cried Madeleine, the young Piedmontaise, who served at table.
Then, still standing, and before all the labourers, I gave an account of my last undertaking. As I finished, my venerable father remarked:
“Well, my boy, I have now done my duty by you. You have had much more schooling than I ever had. It is now for you to choose the road that suits you—I leave you free.”
“Hearty thanks, my father,” I answered.
And then and there—at that time I was one and twenty—with my foot on the threshold of the paternal home, and my eyes looking towards the Alpilles, I formed the resolution, first, to raise and revivify in Provence the sentiment of race that I saw being annihilated by the false and unnatural education of all the schools; secondly, to promote that resurrection by the restoration of the native and historic language of the country, against which the schools waged war to the death; and lastly, to make that language popular by illuminating it with the divine flame of poetry.
All these ideas hummed vaguely in my soul. This eddying and surging of the Provençal sap filled my being, and, free from all conventional literary influences, strong in the independence which gave me wings, and assured that nothing could now deter me, the sight of the labourers one evening, singing as they followed the plough in the furrow, inspired me with the opening song of Mireille.
This poem, the child of love, was peaceably and leisurely brought to birth under the influence of the warm golden sunshine and the breath of the wide sweeping winds of Provence. At the same time I took over the charge of the farm, under the direction of my father, who, at eighty years of age, had become blind. It was a life well suited to me, and this was all I cared for—to be happy in my home and with certain chosen friends. We were indifferent to Paris in those days of innocence. My highest ambition was that Arles, which rose ever on my horizon as did Mantua on that of Virgil, should one day recognise my poetry as her own.
Thus, thinking only of the country people of the Crau and the Camargue, I could truly say in Mireille: